Serialously with Annie Elise
285: Proctor Thought Death Was Caused by Fight & Proof Tail Light Was Smashed in The Sally Port?!
Fri, 06 Jun 2025
We’re wrapping up another week in the Karen Read trial, and this one was packed with major developments. Proctor’s initial text messages reveal he believed John’s death was caused by a fight. New expert testimony suggests the taillight damage seen after the vehicle was moved to the sally port was significantly different from what was observed earlier that afternoon, raising serious questions about when—and how—the damage occurred. Plus, experts took the stand confirming that the wounds on John’s arm were consistent with dog bites. And after much anticipation, ARCCA finally testified. Let’s break it all down. 🔎Join Our True Crime Club & Get Exclusive Content & Perks 🔎 Join The Club: https://www.patreon.com/annieelise 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to EXTRA deep dive episodes every week on Apple! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/serialously-with-annie-elise/id1519456164 Follow Annie on Socials 📸 🩷Instagram: @ _annieelise 💜TikTok: @_annieelise 🗞️ Substack: @annieelise 💙Facebook: @10tolife Shop Annie’s Closet & Must-Haves! 👗 Poshmark: https://posh.mk/Tdbki6Ae0Rb ShopMY: https://shopmy.us/annieelise Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/shop/10tolife?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_aipsfshop_BKN1ZMCMEZHACVFQ2R75&language=en_US Disclaimer ‣ Some links may be affiliate links, they do not cost you anything, but I make a small percentage from the sale. Thank you so much for watching and supporting me. 🎙️ Follow the podcast for FREE on all podcast platforms! Apple:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/serialously-with-annie-elise/id1519456164 Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/6HdheEH8WeMTHoe5da34qU All Other Platforms: https://audioboom.com/channels/5100770-serialously-with-annie-elise Get Involved or Recommend the Case 💬 About Annie: https://annieelise.com/ For Business Inquiries: [email protected] . *Sources used to collect this information include various public news sites, interviews, court documents, FB groups dedicated to the case, and various news channel segments. When quoting statements made by others, they are strictly alleged until confirmed otherwise. Please remember my videos are my independent opinion and to always do your own research.
Chapter 1: What developments occurred in the Karen Read trial this week?
Hey, true crime besties. Welcome back to an all new episode of Serialist League.
Hey everybody, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly with me, Annie Elise. Sorry, I'm like just in a very good mood. It's Friday, I'm wearing this like tomato red sweater that is like blinding me in my monitors because it's so bright, but whatevs. I'm in a really good mood. My son had his kindergarten, like not graduation, but like song this morning at a little themed breakfast.
I'm just in a happy mood. But what we are here to talk about today is not my color of my sweater or my son and his beautiful seashell song and his vocal abilities, but we're here to talk about the Karen Reid trial. More specifically, everything that went down this week in trial.
And this week was incredibly important, not only because all of the testimony, but because it is most likely the last full week we are going to have. It's estimated that the defense is going to complete presenting their case by Tuesday or possibly Wednesday of next week. Then how long do you think we'll be on verdict watch? I don't know. Do you think a day, two days, three days?
We may very well know at this exact time next week if Karen Reed is found innocent, not guilty, framed, mistrial, guilty, all the different things. options of like and variations of how this might play out so We'll see. We are close to the finish line. Now, as I said, this week, let me pull out my notes here. This week was a very important week in the trial.
And I'm going to, of course, have Elena join. She's going to break it all down for us in her beautiful science, you know, not science. Well, she is, I guess, a scientist. So in her scientist, beautiful, organized ability. But for now, let me give you just the table of contents, OK, of what we're going to be talking about.
We're going to be talking about Michael Proctor and the group chat and his text messages and how in those text messages he says how he initially thought that it was a fight in the house based on what paramedics and stuff said of what caused John O'Keefe's death. But then, as we know, 12, 24, 36 hours later, he was completely changing his tune. We also are going to talk about Officer Dever.
You may have already seen the clips that I put out on social media this week. She was a very hostile witness, not only in the sense of, like, the actual legal definition, but just her behavior and her attitude. She was very combative, very abrasive, just not... not... someone I would ever want to engage in a conversation with, to be quite honest.
And what I found most compelling about her testimony is when she discussed the closed doors meeting she had, we all know her salary for a rookie cop, how as a rookie she was having some important meetings with some pretty high up people, how she said point blank that she saw Higgins go into the sally port for a weirdly long amount of time, or whatever she said, I'm paraphrasing, you'll hear the exact quote from Elena,
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Chapter 2: What did Michael Proctor's text messages reveal?
Going back to previous conversation and speculation, it's been insinuated that that car possibly belongs to an Albert family member, Colin, and that he was there to pick up Chloe, the German shepherd, and take her away. Is that true? I don't know. Just telling you what everybody's talking about.
And then we wrapped up the trial this week with the ARCA experts on the stand who otherwise are known out there in the trial circuit as the crash daddies. So... Like I said, I'm kind of in a funny mood today, guys. I don't know. But it was a lot of interesting testimony, a lot to get into. I told you last week I would let you know if my opinion has changed at all.
And if I still feel like I'm in the third bucket of, I don't know what happened, but that I think there's too much reasonable doubt to convict Karen, I'm still there. I'm still there. I haven't gone full stop to... frame conspiracy. But I will say I'm definitely inching my way closer over to that. Not necessarily.
Well, I mean, yeah, I guess I will say I am moving closer to that because the dog bites, guys, it's we talked about this weeks and weeks ago. At face value, when you hear about this case, the Occam's razor easy conclusion of it all is that Karen was wasted. She hit John with her car. She questioned it as much, saying, could I have clipped him? Could I have hit him?
And doesn't even remember, blacked out and drove away. But then you start bringing in all the other details. The dog being rehomed, but there being seemingly dog bites on John's arm. A possible fight in the basement and them redoing the flooring and jackhammering out cement that they redid that flooring a year earlier and ended up even selling that home right after this. That doesn't make sense.
The Google searches, the butt dials from all different people, not just one person, multiple people, call histories erased. Higgins saying he was going to move cars at the precinct, but he only moved one. Someone at dispatch saying that he was in the sally port for a weird amount of time. Tail light not being found at the scene, then being found hours later after Karen's car is taken.
All of these things make that what once might have been a simple explanation, not so simple. And... It does not sit right with me at all. And I will say this, too. I had a thought pop in my mind. Let me see if it comes back to me as I was going through all of that. Oh, yeah.
We also saw more like more close up footage from Waterfall that night where it looks like Higgins is pretty pissed off where he like waves in John's direction.
there it seems like the guy has to like calm him down put his arm on him then he's texting as we know like are you coming here heard you're coming here whatever the heck he said again paraphrasing um it just doesn't look good and i i don't know so i'm curious to know what you guys think I still am very much a toss-up here.
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Chapter 3: What was the significance of Officer Dever's testimony?
Then when talking about if the collision was intentional, Proctor said, quote, That's a whole nother animal we won't be able to prove. So even Proctor thinks that intentional homicide isn't provable. But still, he says, quote, zero chance she's skating. She's effed. Really professional conduct from a decorated state trooper, right? But just wait, it gets worse.
One of his friends asked, quote, she hot at least? Proctor replied, quote, She's a whack job C-word. Yeah, she's a babe. Weird Riverfall accent, though. No ass. Then he also made derogatory comments, the specifics of which I really don't want to repeat, about Karen having colitis and colon cancer. Now, obviously, these are all horrendously inappropriate, unprofessional, all of that.
But I actually think that this last one is the most damning in terms of showing Proctor's mindset in regards to the investigation. This is the one that shows that Proctor is not only a dirtbag, but a biased dirtbag. One front asked if the homeowner at 34 Fairview would, quote, receive some shit for having, you know, a dead body turn up on his lawn.
Proctor's response, quote, nope, homeowner's a Boston cop too. He's not saying, nope, homeowner didn't have anything to do with it. Not, nope, it was definitely a car collision, nothing to do with the house. Those are not the reasons Proctor gives for why the Alberts won't be implicated. The reason he gives is much more telling. It's because he's a Boston cop too.
Now, if that's not clear evidence of the Blue Wall of Silence, I don't know what is. And keep in mind, this is only 16 hours, less than a day into John's death. Well before a thorough investigation was done, but Proctor? His mind is already made up. Now, the defense's next witness was Boston Police Officer Kelly Dever, who was a patrol officer for Canton Police on the night of John's death.
Dever is what's known as the hostile witness. That term doesn't actually have anything to do with the witness's attitude, although in this case, Dever certainly did have an abrasive attitude. But it actually means a witness who testifies against the party that called them. So in this case, she was called by the defense, but her stance lines up more with the prosecution's theory.
To give another example, if the prosecution had called, say, Karen's father, who was, by the way, on their witness list, if they had called him, he would be considered a hostile witness for the prosecution because his stance and beliefs align more with the defense.
So despite how much clearly she did not want to be on the stand, the defense still wanted to call her because she said something really interesting in an August 2023 interview with federal investigators. She told them that when she was observing video feed of the Canton PD garage on the day of John's death,
She saw ATF agent Brian Higgins and former police chief Ken Berkowitz go into the garage together and alone with Karen's SUV for, quote, a wildly long time. Now, if that's true, that would be huge. That would be an eyewitness to two members of law enforcement, one of which is thought by many to be a suspect in John's murder.
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Chapter 4: What did the dog bite expert conclude about John's injuries?
They were so affectionate, in fact, that when John kissed Karen on the forehead, Karina looked over at her husband and said, hey, why don't you ever do that kind of nice thing to me? She called it, quote, the sweetest thing I've ever seen.
Karina also said that although Karen had been drinking, she didn't appear to be really impaired in any way, and she had, quote, no concerns about her driving home that night. Then on Friday, we got started with the much-anticipated testimony from ARCA. The first ARCA witness was Dr. Daniel Wolfe, who's the director of accident reconstruction.
On direct, it was clear that attorney Jackson wanted the jury to know that Dr. Wolfe and ARCA were not hired by the defense initially. We know that the ARCA experts were originally hired by outside federal investigators, but all the jury is allowed to know in this trial is that the experts were hired by some sort of outside entity.
Then Dr. Wolf testified to two main types of testing that his group did to try to figure out if the damage to Karen's car and the injuries to John's body were consistent with being in a collision.
In the first type of test, Dr. Wolf wanted to see if the damage to Karen's taillight could have been caused by something other than hitting John, specifically whether throwing a cocktail glass at that taillight could cause the damage. So his team designed a cannon, a literal cannon, that could launch cocktail glasses at different model tail lights.
And he found that firing the cocktail glass at 37 miles per hour could cause damage to the tail light that was consistent with what was found on Karen's car. Then when asked to compare his test to Dr. Welcher's blue paint test, Dr. Wolf pointed out that Welcher only showed that it was possible for John's arm and the taillight to align at the same height.
But the test doesn't really prove much else besides that. It doesn't show what kind of force would be generated or what kind of injuries it might cause.
Then in his second series of tests, Dr. Wolf used a Lexus that was the same model as Karen's, along with a crash dummy and a special dummy arm, and he used these to try to model what a collision between the car and the arm would look like at different speeds. He did the tests at 10, 15, 17, 24, and 29 miles per hour.
and he experimented with other variables too like suspending the dummy arm from either a forklift or attaching it to the crash dummy and then trying both head-on and sideswipe type collisions and he testified that all of his tests at all speeds and no matter how the crash arm was positioned all of those tests showed that the damage to the example tail light was quote completely inconsistent with the damage to karen's tail light
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